Hockey Punk

By * J.C.

PAPERBACK HERO

Directed by PETER PEARSON Screenplay by LES ROSE and BARRY PEARSON

This is a movie apparently constructed around a single picture, an image stuck in the back of someone's brain that should have stayed there. In any case, the crucial scene in Paperback Hero is the closing one. A small-town Canadian yahoo stands in the middle of the main street, decked out in gunbelt and stetson, calling for a Shootout with the local members of the Mounted Police. If such an image seems both unpromising and unlikely, what appears before and builds up to it is no better and not even as interesting.

Rick Dillon (Keir Dullea), small time hockey hero and man-about-the-small-town of Delisle, Sask. (pop. 700), knocks around a good deal, getting up to no good. He rouses the passions of a loyal barmaid named Loretta (Elizabeth Ashley), even while leching after the daughter of the hockey-team owner (Dayle Haddon) and making up to a raucous number who works in the bowling alley over in the next town. Implausibly, Dillon has enough energy left over from these various pursuits to carouse with his lumpish buddy Pov (John Beck) and play a fierce, albeit mediocre, game of hockey. As if to establish an affinity with his namesake, the town marshal of Dodge City, Dillon likes to don Western duds and pop off a few rounds at tar get practice. In Delisle he is a novelty. But as this movie amply proves, there is not much happening up there.

His woman-baiting and good-timing are meant to seem hollow, pitiful. They are less than that. "You don't have a brain in your head," the owner's daughter yells at him, information that startles only Dillon. Since much of the distaff population of Delisle finds Dillon irresistible, it is tempting to deduce from Paperback Hero the message that the Canadian woods are full of masochists.

The men take their lumps on the ice, then pass them along to the womenfolk in the bedroom. Loretta's steadfast affection for Dillon is meant to be win some, cockeyed and noble all at once. But in this benighted melodrama, com passion and indulgence are the same, and women are the stronger vessel be cause they take their punishment with a tear and a smile.

* J.C.

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